At Newsweek, Vanessa Gezari offers a sobering look at the Army’s Human Terrain System. The military’s use of anthropology in Afghanistan, she says, “was ultimately a complex mix of brains and ambition, idealism and greed, idiocy, optimism, and bad judgment.”

Martin Libicki at Foreign Affairs cautions against “cyberhype”: “[W]hile a cyberattack could theoretically disable infrastructure or endanger civilian lives, its effects would unlikely reach the scale U.S. officials have warned of.”

Warlord’s Quote of the Day

“Do as much good as you can for as many people as you can for as long as you can.” — John Wesley, founder of Methodism

Contributed by Col. (ret.) John Craig, a NATO nuclear policy, then a Pentagon emergency planner, who retired as Executive Director of the National War College Alumni Association. From a list compiled by the Warlord Loop, a private email forum for national security experts.